SCUM

God there are some scum in the world, aren’t there? You know who I’m talking about. People who just don’t deserve to be alive. People who have given up the right to the classification ‘human’. Mouth-breathing, fist-clenching, spitting, retching, bile-inducing scum.

Now, I’m not being classist, racist, sexist or anythingist here. Scum exists in all walks of life, from posh scum to chav scum to homeless scum. Black, white, yellow and brown Scum. Girl Scum. But all of them deserving of a series of rabbit-punches that leaves them unable to walk without looking like they’re trying to reach the bottom pocket of their combat trousers without bending at the waist.

I have now come up with the definitive formula enabling the identification of Scum. Here it is:

S = v/d

Where S is scum, v is volume (in decibels) and d is the distance between me and them.

To illustrate:

So, you can see that Scum are people who speak abnormally loudly (because their tiny brains are too self-absorbed and concave to appreciate that there are other people around who do not want to hear their braying/whiny/horse-pitched/estuary scum talk), and stand ridiculously close (because they have learnt that only through intimidation can they ever get any sort of response from another human that isn’t abject disgust).

PSI stands for ‘Personal Space Invader’. A phrase I suspect I got either from some ‘down with the kids’ psychology textbook, or more likely from reading the entire collection of my sister’s “The Babysitters Club” books as a child (see below). Thus, the PSI circle denotes the radius within which another person’s presence makes you feel uncomfortable. Unless this person is a sexual partner, in which in my case I probably feel uncomfortable around them all the time.

Note that the equation is a ratio, and the units are defined in a way that anything over 1 is Scumtime. One of the component factors alone is not enough to classify a person as Scum, rather than human. They may speak loudly because of a hearing deficit, or because they were raised by deaf folk, or because they were ignored as a child. But these people will have learned long ago that their propensity for volume means that they need to stand well clear of the PSI circle to avoid causing eardrum damage and inevitable bursts of violence.

A person may also invade the circle and speak quietly, and not be scum. Perhaps they need to be that close for their pathetic little no-voice to reach your ears. Perhaps they were raised by bears and need constant closeness. Who cares.

The point is, when both inappropriate closeness and volume are combined, you have Scum.

Exceptions to those who score over 1 on this scale are children under 10 and spastics. Neither of whom can help this Scum-like behaviour but gradually learn through knowledge, experience and repeated beatings the correct way to behave.

Once you have identified Scum, it is only a matter of time before you see them shouting insults at people in the street, spitting their sickening phlegm on a public walkway and talking on their mobile phone so loudly that the other person hears their voice twice, once in their phone and once across the entirety of fucking London. The only solution, sadly, is to disembowel them like the psycho Japanese teenage schoolgirl in Kill Bill.

Vive la revolution.

SL